18 COMMENT THE SOCIAL NETWORK
Patrick Mooney, editor of Housing, Management & Maintenance
ENDING HOMELESSNESS NEEDS MORE THAN CASH
Patrick Mooney discusses whether expanded homelessness programmes will help to deliver the Government’s new target for the ending of rough sleeping.
U
nexpectedly the Government has brought forward its target for ending rough sleeping on the streets of Britain
by three years to 2024.
The original target was already considered to be ‘ambitious’ and a tough one to achieve, but the New Year was only a few days old when Prime Minister Johnson announced increased allocations of £263m in funding for councils to beef up their work on tackling and preventing homelessness. The Government’s homelessness programmes are now worth £1.2bn in total.
More money is always welcome, particularly in a sector which has seen its resources put under enormous strain. But it will take more than money to deliver the extra social housing and changes in public policies that will be required to meet the ‘nil rough sleeping’ target, according to campaigning groups like Shelter and Crisis.
THE COUNCIL LEFT THE WOMAN SLEEPING ON THE FLOOR OF A FLAT FOR THREE MONTHS
WWW.HBDONLINE.CO.UK
This is particularly true when the early evidence is showing us that many councils across the country, but particularly in London, are struggling to deliver the laudable outcomes envisaged in the Homelessness Reduction Act. Surely it was no coincidence that the extra funding announcement coincided with the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman publishing its finding that the London Borough of Tower Hamlets had badly let down a young pregnant woman, who had approached the council for help after her father threw her out of the family home in early 2019.
As a result of misinterpreting its legal responsibilities, not doing what it should have done and failing to cope with staff
shortages, the council left the woman sleeping on the floor of a privately rented flat for three months. The Ombudsman decided to publicise the
case as it felt other councils had lessons to learn from the mishandling of the woman’s homelessness application. Clearly staff at Tower Hamlets council are not alone in strug- gling to deliver their new responsibilities towards those threatened with homelessness. So are the announcements on changing the rough sleeping target and the extra money any more than window dressing when compared to the scale of the problem?
INCREASE IN NUMBERS SEEKING HELP Research carried out last year by LSE London on behalf of London Councils and the London Housing Directors’ Group shows that imple- mentation of the Homelessness Reduction Act since April 2018 has substantially increased the number of people seeking help from the boroughs, and demands on the resources required for public services.
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